From 1 January 2011, Councils in the UK are likely to be required to publish details of payments to suppliers over £500. Although some Councils have already started to publish this information, there is obviously a reticense to develop costly reporting solutions. Councils therefore appear to publish the information in downloadable format either as Excel spreadsheets or PDF documents. Although this may 'tick' the required disclosure requirements, we do not believe that this provides real value to the public.

Information such as this only has real value if it can be viewed in context (i.e. is a payment normal or abnormal). For a user to be able to make this interpretation, they may need to be able to look at spend in a month for a particular expense category against similar spend in previous periods or against other categories.

BIOLAP has developed an application, driven by arcplan technology, that we will provide to Councils free of charge to allow members of the public to analyse expenditure, slice and dice information and drill through to the underlying transactions.

In addition, BIOLAP also provides its full Council Expenses data set in a single downloadable CSV file format to enable users to re-use the data and to perform their own analysis. This is subject attribution licensing. To view the licensing terms and to download data, click on the link below: